Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education have partnered to develop a new, online professional learning opportunity to help prepare preK-12 school leaders at all stages of their careers to drive change and lead high-performing schools. [...]

Every once in a while something happens in the business world that compels us to stop, take notice, reflect, and learn. Enron’s collapse, the financial crisis, the VW diesel emission scandal, and BP’s Macondo oil well explosion come to mind. The Wells Fargo reputation implosion unfolding now is another example, and it is full of lessons for future and current leaders. Like most truly troubling events, it is a multi-element situation that does not easily yield to a single point failure analysis. Of course CEO and board choices and behaviors are at the heart of the problem, but there are many other elements. Let’s use our HBS analysis and critical thinking skills to dissect the case and see what lessons we can take away. [...]

Our HBS General Management class had just completed a series of cases about decision-making processes. In these cases, time and time again the leader or team had made poor decisions with often devastating results. The class had successfully identified several root causes in each case, but a common thread in the cases was that regardless of the process, it had failed to yield a good decision because the collective wisdom of the group had not been effectively revealed and used. [...]